The Condition of Postmodernity 13 - autonomous learning

7IntroductionIf there has been some kind of transformation in the political economyof late twentieth-century capitalism, then it behoves us toestablish how deep and fundamental the change might be. Signs andtokens of radical changes in labour processes, in consumer habits, ingeographical and geopolitical configurations, in state powers andpractices, and the like, abound. Yet we still live, in the West, in asociety where production for profit remains the basic organizingprinciple of economic life. We need some way, therefore, to representall the shifting and churning that has gone on since the first majorpost-war recession of 1973, which does not lose sight of the fact thatthe basic rules of a capitalist mode of production continue to operateas invariant shaping forces in historical- geographical development.The language (and therefore the hypothesis) that I shall explore isone in which we view recent events as a transition in the regime ofaccumulation and its associated mode of social and political regulation.In representing matters this way, I am resorting to the language of acertain school of thought known as the 'regulation school.' Theirbasic argument, pioneered by Aglietta (1979) and advanced by Lipietz(1986), Boyer (1986a; 1986b), and others, can briefly be summarized.A regime of accumulation 'describes the stabilization over a longperiod of the allocation of the net product between consumption andaccumulation; it implies some correspondence between the transformationof both the conditions of production and the conditionsof reproduction of wage earners.' A particular system of accumulationcan exist because 'its schema of reproduction is coherent.' The problem,however, is to bring the behaviours of all kinds of individuals- capitalists, workers, state employees, financiers, and all manner ofother p'olitical- economic agents - into some kind of configurationthat will keep the regime of accumulation functioning. There mustexist, therefore, 'a materialization of the regime of accumulation